Slade Anniversary

     Every June 7th, I text 'Happy Slade anniversary' to my friend Jeff. Sometimes he sends the text first.  
 
     We live many miles apart and haven't been the close friends we once were for many years. But the Slade connection is forever. We'd met when I was 15, and taking singing lessons at the community college where he was a DJ at the campus radio station. He saw me in my Slade T shirt, jumped up, ripped his headphones off, and abandonded annoucing the next record. "SLADE! I LOVE SLADE!" he gushed. I'm not sure what happened next, but it should have been us hugging each other and dancing around in cartoonishly fast circles. A fellow American Slade freak was a true treasure. Within five minutes we practically fell over each other asking "Where you there? Where you there?" Yes, June 7th had happened for him too.    
 
    Jeff went on to become an award-winning news producer and music critic. We saw countless bar bands together, many concerts, attended South by Southwest in Austin, etc, and I sometimes got to meet musicians he knew, but sometimes the most fun of all, in the early years, was just getting stoned together and listening to music he'd pick from his collection of thousands of albums.  
 
    Before I'd met Jeff, at I5, I'd already been a Slade freak for two years. I was a faithful viewer of The Midnight Special, a late night concert TV program. The night Slade- a band I'd never heard of- was on was my first experience of falling in love.  
 
     Don't knock it. Falling in love with a band was everything that goes with young love- the feeling of rightness, the infatuation, the disbelief that this was happening to me. All the good stuff with none of the awkwardness of real boys. A sweet neighbor was infatuated with me at the time. Every week he bought me nicer and nicer gifts, culminating in a white rabbit's fur purse with a gold chain, which was the height of fashion at the time (hoping now the fur was fake...) I appreciated being courted, but I wasn't ready for dating. But rock and roll? I was ready for that.  
 
    Six months after the fateful Midnight Special show, my radio station, WSHE, announced- impossibly, incredibly- the Slade concert. They played snippets of the songs I was sure I was the only American who knew. Before I wouldn't shut up about them, none of my friends had heard of Slade. Still, I managed to recruit three of them, plus my sister, to accompany me to the concert. June 7th couldn't come soon enough.  
 
    Before Slade, I'd only been to two concerts: Blood Sweat and Tears, and David Cassidy. I think the Blood Sweat and Tears concert came first. My friend Nancy's dad was as wealthy as mine, maybe even more so. He had some connection that allowed us to sit in the empty concert hall during the band's sound check. We got to watch the band members dump spit out of their trombones! Whee! The concert itself was great, though the opening act was so terrible the audience applauded when they announced their last song. Mistaking that for an encore request, the band returned only to be greeted by a collective groan. I thought maybe all opening bands sucked.  
 
    Nancy was also with me for David Cassidy. Only six months older than me, she had discovered boys in a big way and screamed though the show out of genuine lust. I thought Cassidy was cute, but I was just screaming because how often do you get to scream? I thought it was fun. My paternal grandfather and my cousin Marcie were also subjected to this hormone-drenched preteen fest. Perfect little Marcie, at nine years old, was already too sophisticated to join Nancy and me in our chant of "I love coffee, I love tea! I love David Cass-i-dy! Marcie is now a pious Orthodox Jew.  Maybe her chant should be 'I love shabbat, I dance the Hora, I really love to read the Torah!'
 
    Nancy was not one of the friends who came to the Slade concert. Though we were still close, in the past two years she'd undergone a fairy tale transformation into a legendary beauty. I think she was already dating University of Miami football players by then. No matter, my friends and even my shy, prim sister were soon dancing through every song with me. The music was thunderously, volcanically, deafening loud. I was ecstatic. Even the opening band, 10CC, whom none of us had ever heard of, was great. A highlight of the show was Noddy Holder's tophat. He'd designed it to catch and refract the stage lights. When he tilted his head, the mirrors came alive, throwing dancing circles of light all over the audience. It remains one of my all-time favorite concert memories. I can still perfectly see the look on Holder's face, as he tilted the hat just so. With his red hair and glint in his eye, he reminded me of a leprauchan. I sensed a highly intelligent, wildly clever man, and I was smitten. Don Powell, the good looking drummer would have been a more obvous choice, but eye candy didn't get me where I lived. I had awakened to who I was. I was a Noddy girl.  
 
    In the decades before my father died nine years ago, he never forgot picking us up from that concert. He was always early, and so had arrived about twenty minutes before the show was over. An usher opened the door for him to an alternate reality. The ferocity of the loudness for one thing, but what he remembered most was guitarist Dave Hill, whom he thereafter referred to as Butterfly Man. Must have been Hill's silver, blue, and yellow outfit, replete with thigh-high silver platform boots with six inch heels, and an elaborate metallic headdress. Hill and bassist Jim Lea both spent the show dancing atop enormous speaker cabinets.  
 
    I love remembering how my dad still laughed, years later, unable to process the auditory and visual assault. I love remembering dancing with my sister, and the three friends I've now been out of touch with for years. I cherish the quaking volume of that night, though I hold it, not age, accountable for my mild hearing loss. I love remembering the connection Jeff and I had, and hope it fully rekindles one day. And I still love listening to Slade. Not just for the memories, but because their music still gets me where I live. I doubt there will ever be a June 7th that's not my Slade anniversary..